
By: David Bloomberg
Re: True or False?

(File: TRUEFALS.ZIP)

Date:   Mon Mar 20 1995  15:24:02
From:   SHEPPARD GORDON
Subj:   Recovered Mem Quackery
ABDUCT                         -------------------------------

RECOVERED MEMORIES:  TRUE OR FALSE?
2/05/95 SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER

   The 90s promised to be the decade of recovered memory. Women all over
North America - Roseanne Arnold prominent among them - were emerging from
psychological therapy accusing their fathers of sexually molesting them years
before. A few men told similar tales. They had repressed the memories
completely, their therapists said, and only in professional care had the
images come popping back, like ghoulish jacks-in-the-box.

   These "survivors" accused their parents of heinous crimes. Some took
parents to court, and forced them to pay tens of thousands of dollars. A few
sent fathers to jail. The accusers also told lurid tales in mass-marketed
books and on TV talk shows. The media ate it up: The stories were graphic,
the emotions compelling. The victims believed their stories with vehemence.
Their intense emotional pain proved, their therapists said, that their
stories were real.

   For a skeptic to label that reasoning circular was to be ill-mannered if
not anti-feminist. To say that the "recovered memory movement" looked more
like a cult than science was to risk appearing as a defender of perverts.

   Three things have happened to change that.

   First, the recovered memories got unbelievably weird. They escalated from
scenes of abuse to years of rape and sodomy, and finally to satanic rituals
of drinking blood, sex with animals and killing and eating human babies.

   Second, many of these alleged abuse victims have recanted their tales, and
some have sued their therapists.

   Third, the whole movement has been called into question by academic
experts.

   Two such experts have just published damning books: Elizabeth Loftus's The
Myth of Repressed Memory (St. Martin's Press, 290 pages, $22.95), and Richard
Ofshe's Making Monsters (Scribners, 340 pages, $23). Loftus is a professor of
psychology at the University of Washington, where she has gained national
attention for her experiments about human memory. Ofshe is a professor of
social psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, and is an expert
on cults. In 1979, he shared a Pulitzer Prize for an investigation of Synanon,
a drug-recovery cult in California.

   Both attack the idea that we naturally repress memories of horrible things
done to us when we were kids. Unlike victims of amnesia - a rare disorder -
the recovered-memory patients supposedly lost all awareness that a hole had
been ripped from the fabric of their memories. They had remembered childhoods
free of violence until visions emerged in therapy of being abused for years.

   Ofshe argues that if the human mind was capable of such massive repression,
the fact would have been discovered centuries ago. He writes, "Why are we
the first generation to notice that people can repress oft-repeated trauma so
completely as to have no knowledge that they experienced a life filled with
horror and brutality?"

   The victims of Hitler, Stalin and Mao did not repress what had happened to
them. Nor are the people who suffered genuine child abuse likely ever to
forget it.

   The "recovered memories," these authors argue, are created in therapy by
the patient trying to please the therapist. The patient is encouraged to
believe that her psychological problems are symptoms of early childhood abuse.
The lack of any memory of abuse is itself a symptom. Does the patient insist
that abuse never happened? Then she is "in denial" - also a symptom.

   It is a neat piece of circular reasoning. "A scientific theory has to be
falsifiable," Loftus reminds her readers. This one is not. Arguing the
repressed-memory concept with believers, Loftus writes, is like "arguing with
the minister about the existence of God."

   Those who accept the concept are disinclined to challenge anything dragged
out of the subconscious. Any strange image can be interpreted as a sign - a
memory - of abuse. The patient may doubt it, but is encouraged to recall the
image, retell it, embellish it, believe it. The memory of the image becomes
indistinguishable from a memory of the event. Once the patient accepts one
"recovered memory" as true, she has stepped into a fantasy land filled with
the most awful things a Christian could imagine.

   Consider the case of Paul Ingram. He was the chief civil deputy of the
Thurston County Sheriff's Department, the chairman of the local Republican
Party, and the father of five children. In a lurid and shocking case in 1991,
this picture of respectability confessed that he was a high priest in a
satanic cult that included cannibalism and the sodomizing of children.

   The Ingrams were members of the Church of the Living Water, an affiliate
of the fundamentalist sect founded by Los Angeles radio evangelist Aimee
Semple McPherson in 1927. Repression theory, writes Loftus, "made sense to
Ingram. It was simply a secular version of the church's doctrine of Satanic
deception: Satan attempts to destroy our memories of evil deeds." Ingram's
belief in Satanic influence became crucial when his daughter Ericka came back
from a church retreat with a "recovered memory" that she had been molested by
her father. Another sister, Julie, began making similar accusations. Ingram
was put under arrest.

   He had no memory of the events. But the stories must be true, he said,
because his daughters would not lie. Ingram's minister urged him to expel
Satan from his soul. A police psychologist put him into a hypnotic trance.
Ingram was told to visualize the scenes of abuse. At first he could not, but
by and by he did visualize them.

   It was like watching a movie, he said. The psychologist would ask him to
focus on a picture, and describe who was in it. Was the person wearing a
watch? What was the time on the watch? Ingram could roll his "memory" like a
video.

   The daughters' stories grew more and more horrifying. Ingram had raped his
children, daughters and sons alike, for many years. He had invited his work
buddies in to participate. Ericka said he was the leader of a Satanic cult
that had killed more than 25 babies, burying their bones in the woods behind
the Ingram house. Ingram was confronted with these stories, searched in his
subconscious, and began confirming them. Ericka said her body bore the scars
of repeated injuries. Under a court order, she was examined. The doctor found
no scars. Police searched the woods around the Ingram house. They found no
bones, or any other evidence of satanic rituals. Nor were any reports of 25
babies missing in Olympia.

   Prosecutors called in Ofshe, an expert in cults. When he was interviewing
Ingram, he suggested that Ingram had forced a son and a daughter to have sex
together. A daughter had remembered it, Ofshe said, challenging Ingram to
remember it himself.

   Ingram could not. But he went away trying to remember it, and the next day
he did. He came back with a detailed confession.

   When Ofshe told him that the story was a lie he had made up as a test,
Ingram hung on to his "memory." The images were just the same as the other
memories, he insisted. They were real.

   The Thurston County Prosecutor's Office thought so, too. Though they
dropped the charges against Ingram's two friends from work, and dropped all
investigation of satanic rites, they went ahead with charges of rape. They
told Ingram he'd better plead guilty to spare his daughters the psychological
damage of testifying. Ingram, who believed the charges true, pleaded guilty
to six counts of third-degree rape and was sentenced to 20 years. Later he
decided his "memories" were not real.

   To Ofshe, the question is answered by his experiment. He is bitter at what
he sees as the cowardice of Thurston County prosecutors. Speaking earlier
this year in Seattle, he said

   "The people who ran this investigation should have known it was all
nonsense. Their attitude was that it was better to suffer the sacrifice of an
innocent man than the consequences of their incompetence."

   Loftus calls the Ingram case "a modern-day Salem witch trial," and has
written Gov. Mike Lowry requesting clemency for Paul Ingram.

   The case was the subject in 1993 of a series in "The New Yorker" by
Lawrence Wright, who detailed how Ingram became a victim of false memories.
Wright's essay became the 1994 book, "Remembering Satan." But convicted
rapists don't get out of prison just because somebody writes a book arguing
that they are innocent. On Dec. 2, Ingram's request for a review was rejected
by the state Clemency and Pardons Board because his case is under appeal. He
remains in prison.

   The tales of Satanic cults are the unmistakable signs of the absurd. So
are outlandish accounts of earlier incarnations, or of being captured by
aliens and taken for rides in UFOs. All are justified by recovered memories.

   No one has proved reincarnation, or produced an alien or a UFO.

   And no one has yet uncovered a cult of child-rapers and baby-eaters in
modern America, let alone whole networks of them. There have been some
strange groups, all right - one is reminded of Jonestown, or the Charles
Manson cabal, or the killings at Matamoros. But all were found out. "None of
these groups were able to kill without leaving physical evidence," writes
Ofshe, "nor were they able to select victims who were not missed by family
and friends."

   Cults do exist. A central feature of them is people disowning their
families and their beliefs for a new "family" and new beliefs, and giving up
control to a guru. Something very much like this has been happening with
recovered memories.

   Erstwhile rational people disowning their real memories and participating
in self-brainwashing. They discard their old identities as parents and
professionals, and redefine themselves as abuse victims. They turn cold to
their parents, often denouncing them in Mao-like struggle sessions. They are
adopted into a surrogate family of "survivors."

   Their pain and anger is good, the therapists say: The treatment is working.
 No pain, no gain. Patients congratulate themselves on their courage;
therapists, on their skill. Therapists dig deeper, and unearth more memories.
The pain gets worse. Some patients lose their jobs, abandon their spouse and
children, and check into the hospital. Some even attempt suicide, and a few
succeed.

   And yes, the therapists and hospitals get paid. Memory recovery is a
business. Hundreds of millions of dollars has been paid out over the last
dozen years, Ofshe writes, half to three-quarters of it by insurance
companies and the government. Patients have paid out tens of thousands, and
some have had to sell their homes.

   Ofshe tells the story of a woman who goes through the whole process,
exhausts her ability to pay, and is dumped by her therapist into the hands of
a state psychiatrist. He determines that she is not sick at all, and tells
her to go home. Separated from her therapist, she begins to get well.

   Ofshe does not hang back. Recovered memory, he says in an interview, is
quackery. It is comparable to the lobotomy fad of 50 years ago, when doctors
scrambled the brains of mental patients with icepicks. Now therapists are
doing it with talk therapy and hypnosis. "We're talking about a fraction of
the mental health professionals who have done something inexcusable," Ofshe
says. "They have committed terrible, unnecessary harm on their patients."

   If the good psychologists don't drive them out of the profession, he says,
the recovered-memory therapists will be buried in "the coming blizzard of
malpractice suits."


